The Mitt Romney Industrial Average

The Romney campaign’s uneven, sporadic progress doesn’t lend itself to traditional metaphors. It doesn’t "roll on," for example. It’s not a bandwagon. It doesn’t gallop like a racehorse, surge like a wave, or stumble like a drunkard. Nor does it "press on slowly and inexorably." (That would be Newt Gingrich, the contest’s self-styled "tortoise.") No, it moves in another manner entirely, rising, falling, and rising in marginal increments that form a general trend line, which slopes upward. It moves like a stock or an index fund, that is, climbing what brokers call a "wall of worry."

No wonder the pundits are at such a loss when analyzing the primaries: The vocabulary that best describes the leading candidate’s situation belongs to financial, not political, journalism. It’s the language of CNBC, not CNN. And it’s also, of course (and not incidentally), Mitt Romney’s native tongue.

He’s long the Republican nomination, Mitt. He doesn’t day-trade, he’s a buy-and-hold man, reinvesting his dividends as he goes along and diversifying across sectors (meaning, in this case, regions and demographics). Unlike the market timers in the press who focus on snapshot time frames, manically reacting week-by-week to the results from the latest "crucial swing state" (or minute-by-minute like Wolf Blitzer, who’s come to resemble a fevered auctioneer or an amped-up game show host), the firm of Romney Associates is all about steady capital appreciation. When valued in the short-term, which is the term the media obsesses on, his portfolio seems to be lagging, underperforming, but measured over the medium-to-long-term it’s done just dandy, thank you. Delegates show up in his account singly, in bunches, and sometimes not at all, but check out the man’s monthly statements—he’s getting rich. Even better, and in the tradition of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he used to head, he’s achieving a lot of these gains through leverage, spending Super PAC money while conserving his own.

This isn’t the old, romantic approach to politics but something alien, even futuristic. Classically, a presidential candidate is supposed to whip up a frenzy, light a fire. That’s what Obama did in the last election, and what Santorum is trying to do now by aiming his blowtorch, apocalyptic rhetoric at the nation’s tinder-dry grassroots. Campaigns are crusades according to this model, amassing momentum by making colossal promises (and encouraging voters to forget what happened to the big promises of yore). Obama touted Hope and Change, while Santorum is pushing their pietistic equivalents, which are equally vaporous and vague but, by comparison, something of a bummer: Repentance and Redemption. (Ron Paul, of course, sells only gold.) Such expansive campaigns are Ponzi schemes, essentially. Their strategy is to blow a giant bubble—one timed not to burst until after the polls are closed and the promoter-in-chief is safely in office, ringed by high walls and secret Service agents.

The key to this game is salesmanship and charisma, which may be why Romney has chosen not to play it, or at least to play it differently. (Yes, he’s magnetic, but in a literal sense, like a piece of cold polarized metal.) Thanks to his years as a cutting-edge corporate raider, Romney understands something that his rivals, as well as most of his predecessors, don’t: the value of control. In the world of private equity, which, in a fashion similar to politics, pulls together the funds of many to advance the interests of the few, control means obtaining the power to hire and fire, sell off assets, and influence operations so as to squeeze more value from a company (a lot more, ideally) than you put in. The goal isn’t gaining ownership, necessarily, but securing decisive influence, which sometimes requires buying the whole business and sometimes just a piece of the right size.

"We didn’t win by a lot," said Romney in Michigan, "but we won by enough." On the night of Super Tuesday, with Ohio still hanging in the balance, he made the same point in slightly different words. There would be good days and bad days, he told the crowd, but eventually the nomination would be his. The insta-read on this from the TV panelists was that he was lowering expectations, partly out of fear of losing Ohio and partly because the next few primaries are set for states that favor Santorum. The truth, though, was that he was averaging expectations. Like a CEO on Wall Street conference call, Romney was providing general guidance by setting aside one-time charges against earnings and other anomalous phenomena and concentrating on overall margins.

Behold: the politician as statistician, immune to gloom and suspicious of euphoria, his eyes on the bottom line, not on the prize. Compared to mathematical, down-the-middle Mitt whose goal is attaining majority control of the Republican board of delegates, Santorum is a buccaneering huckster, brimming over with oaths and claims and pitches that make up in color what they lack in clarity. He’s the look, sound, and feel of American stupid, yes, with his squib of a smile, his empty cookie-jar head, and his discount-men’s-department hair, but at least he’s derived from a recognizable archetype. At least we know what not to trust about him. At least he lies with words, not numbers. Indeed, his galumphing, drooling foolishness probably accounts for his endurance as Romney’s only real competitor. Guys like Rick are the ones that guys like Mitt fire first when they buy out and downsize the Acme Drain Plug factory.

Now it’s down to two of them. The next couple of weeks, Romney once again has to go to non-familiar territory: Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Illinois to name a few. Only Illinois looks friendly at this point. Can Santorum prevail? The Romney camp claims it’s numerically impossible, but that doesn’t mean it’s humanly impossible. In contests that pit man versus machine, there will always be some folks who root for their own species, no matter how pitifully it’s represented. Still, in the decimal-point centers of his pupils, Romney is showing a certain gleam of late. He’s calculated his 30-day moving average. He’s checked his advance-decline line. It all looks positive. And yet, when the TV cameras move in close, when it’s just him in the frame, no wife, no family, there’s still a faint sheen of sweat on his square brow. For all his acumen and discipline, all his experience and expertise, something’s haunting him, nagging at his memory. He’s a piece of the rock, Mitt, and he looks like one, but earthquakes do happen, crashes do occur, and there was a time not all that long ago when Lehman Bros. was rated a strong buy.

Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of a memoir, "Lost in the Meritocracy." His 2001 novel "Up in the Air" is the basis for the film of the same name. His column appears every Friday.

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